Selecting one of several disk drives in a computer system to be the system boot drive is an unreliable and inconsistent process. In many computer systems there may be two or more nonvolatile storage devices such as hard disk drives or solid state storage or partitions of either. One of these devices or partitions is generally more suited to be the boot drive and include an operating system than other devices or partitions. Frequently, the boot drive identified during booting differs from a boot drive identified after the operating system has assumed control of the computer system. After the boot drive is identified, the system can provision the boot drive to install or update an operating system, to configure an installed operating system, and to select a paging drive or a root drive. Difficulties arise when the system attempts to provision the boot drive and the system cannot determine the correct boot drive.
Prior solutions include filtering mechanisms in a random access memory (RAM) booted service operating system. The filtering mechanisms look at each mass storage device discovered by the operating system. These storage devices can be filtered by size, read-write capacity, local versus remote storage, and performance. The filtering mechanism can be used to select the storage device that is the largest and fastest read/write device that is local. The filtering mechanism removes the possibility of CD or DVD read or read/write drives, USB sticks, and SAN LUN drives from being included in the list of possible boot drives. This is often a suitable mechanism but it may not work correctly in cases when two or more storage devices include the same optimal criteria, and at times the mechanism selects the wrong storage device or may incorrectly eliminate a SAN LUN, or other storage device, from the list of possible candidates for the boot drive. No solutions appear to be more preferred than the “Guess your best” approach of the filtering mechanism.
At times, a user may be called upon to decide the boot drive. Often, operating systems can take a half-hour or so to install or otherwise provision. The user may not want to wait at the computer this entire time, yet the installation may require a user's input to select the install destination. Currently, many boot drive provisions require the input of the user.
The inconsistent, unreliable, and user assisted selection of a boot drive can be particularly troublesome in organizations that require or desire the same or similar operating system configuration. Such an organization can include many types of health care enterprises, which are required to maintain consistency throughout the computer systems. In such organizations, properly maintaining the operating systems or other computer programs can be costly and tedious.